Amazing Ritte Van Vlaanderen Bikes Born From Irreverence

SANTA MONICA, California — Spencer Canon didn’t set out to start a bicycle company. He just wanted a kit that didn’t suck.

He found the jerseys and shorts road riders wear boring. Uninspired. So he designed his own, black with light blue and red and yellow stripes. The old-school Belgian vibe looked great, but it needed something.

It needed a story.

Canon found one in the life of Henri “Ritte” Van Lerberghe, who once won Belgium’s biggest race on a borrowed bicycle after downing a few pints at the pub. His improbable career underscored everything Canon thinks cycling should be: fun, free and a bit irreverent. He and his friends started wearing the kit on rides.

That’s when things got weird.

“We were riding as a fake Belgian team that doesn’t exist, but the kit looked so cool we actually got sponsors,” Canon said, laughing at the recollection. “It took a few months, but our fake team and our fake brand just exploded. I realized I could take a fake team and make it real.”

Ritte Van Vlaanderen Bicycles was born.

Above: One of Ritte's neighbors offers his opinion on the Ritte Muur, the company's latest model.

The guys at Ritte (pronounced “Rit-uh”) had no experience in the bike biz when they launched the company in 2010, which may explain why they’ve done everything backward. They started with a jersey, which led to a team, which led to them building bikes, which they sold through a viral marketing campaign. In one particularly funny ad, the UCI announces it is banning the Ritte Bosberg from racing because it provides “an unfair aesthetic advantage.”

“Riders in the peloton may be distracted by the Bosberg’s handsome design, striking color and erotic geometry,” a UCI official earnestly proclaims. “We also believe this bicycle may cause its rider to feel stronger and more confident, which is nothing less than psychological doping.”

“The mountain guys are all so nice and they all have fun,” Canon (pictured) said. “The (cyclo)cross guys are all so nice and they all have fun. And the road guys? They’re all Type As. We wanted to bring fun and irreverence back to cycling.”

No one at Ritte is a Type A. They started almost on a lark, with little more than a dream, an attitude and beer money. World headquarters is a second-floor apartment in a cinderblock building with a great view of the city recycling center and a homeless guy’s encampment. The location, in the one part of Santa Monica you could call sketchy, is oddly appropriate. It shows how serious Ritte is about not taking itself too seriously, even as it elbows its way into the world of high-end boutique bicycles with what are, truth be told, some pretty sweet rigs.

“You can say this whole thing is crazy, that it will never work,” Canon said. “But I’m good at finding holes in the market. There was a space for a brand like ours.”

Canon is an avid cyclist, one of those rail-thin guys who looks like he only gets off his bike long enough to eat some pasta and get some sleep. He’s always loved bicycles and started racing at 12, with the dream of one day seeing his name on one.

“I would draw bicycles as kid,” he said. “I dreamed of designing bikes.”

He especially loved the early monocoque Kestrels, which are beautiful to behold. But life intervened, and after studying sculpture in college and earning a master’s degree in philosophy he went to work in advertising. He was the creative director for a firm and doing quite well, but decided three years ago to change course — which is to say he was fired.

“Turns out I don’t like being told what to do,” he said.

Being out of work leaves you with lots of time to ride, and what cyclist wouldn’t rather be doing that anyway? If you’re going to ride, you might as well look good doing it, so Canon sat down to design a kit worth wearing. A proper kit needs a proper sponsor, so Canon invented “Ritte van Vlaanderen.” If you’re wondering, it means “Ritte from Flanders.”

Canon and his crew “looked like some farm-league pro cycling team from Belgium.” People loved it. Some of them even got the joke. Sponsors came calling. Canon and his friends realized they were onto something.

“It was a made-up thing,” said Dan Green, a former motorcycle racer turned cyclist who handles Ritte’s PR, such as it is. “But by the time anyone figured that out, it was just that much more awesome.”

Above: The world headquarters of Ritte Van Vlaanderen Bicycles.

The success of Ritte Racing, with its fake team but real sponsors, got Canon thinking about building bikes. He knew enough to know a good rig from a bad one and wanted more than anything to provide riders with a race-ready ride at an affordable price. It had to provide great power transfer, light weight and stable handling. And it had to be gorgeous. Definitely gorgeous.

Trouble was, Canon didn’t know anything about working with carbon fiber. So he did what all entrepreneurs do when they need help with manufacturing.

He looked to China.

Canon was at Interbike, the annual bike biz bonanza, three years ago when he hooked up with a Taiwanese firm that specializes in carbon fiber bicycle engineering and manufacturing. (Canon refused to name the company because he doesn’t want competitors cribbing from his business plan.)

“They had a prototype frame that was amazing,” Canon said. “I convinced them to build me 20 bikes. I went out and presold them at cost, then presold 50 more.”

Ritte’s first bike was the Bosberg, an all-around road frameset you can have for $2,150. The Crossberg cyclocross rig ($1,850) arrived last September. Most recently, the company unveiled the 1919TT, a super-aero time trial bike that hits the market next month.

The company sold 120 frames in 2010. That climbed to “around 350” last year. The goal for 2012 is 600, but the emphasis is on refining the product line and ironing out the manufacturing process.

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired.com

More than a dozen bike shops and three international distributors are selling Ritte’s frames, most of them small independent outfits specializing in high-end custom builds.

“We wanted to go with smaller brands in our store, the up-and-coming brands, and Ritte is a really new company,” said Niklas Pearce, the general manager of Cykel, a bike boutique in San Francisco. “We wanted to support the small brands. And they’re nice to deal with, easier to deal with, than some of the larger companies.”

Still, not everyone is convinced Ritte is the real deal. The company has taken heat from haters who say it isn’t building bikes, just slapping its name on commodity rides churned out of a factory in China. Canon has one thing to say about that:

Nuts.

Although he concedes his Taiwanese partner designed “95 percent” of the first-gen Bosberg, Canon insists Ritte called the shots on later models.

“We have a lot more control over the design,” he said. “I’ve designed the new Crossberg. We’ve completely redone the tubes.”

And, he argues, Ritte isn’t doing anything many of the bigger companies aren’t doing too – outsourcing to experts. The way he sees it, he can’t match the expertise of a company specializing in carbon fiber design and manufacturing, so why try?

The point is largely moot because the Bosberg is, by many accounts, a sweet ride. Road Magazine said it “has a comfortable geometry” and “purrs along smoothly” but “where this bike really shines is when descending.”

“You can’t argue with the cool factor of this bike both in design and the way Ritte brands itself,” the magazine concluded. “In this case the style and substance coexist peacefully.”

Further making the entire argument pointless is this: Ritte has expanded beyond carbon fiber to design and manufacture a line of bicycles in Southern California using a somewhat unusual material.

Ritte pulled the sheets off Muur roadie and Steeplechase cross frames at Interbike in September. The Ritte Lab line features stainless rear triangles with carbon main tubes and stainless lugs. They are, in a word, beautiful. If you don’t like off-the-shelf rigs, Ritte will build something to your exact specs.

Everything’s made one at a time by Russ Denny, a welder who has been building bicycles since master framebuilder Dave Moulton taught him the ropes in 1986.

So why stainless?

“The stainless steel triangle transforms the bike,” Canon said. "It makes it unlike any bike you’ve ever ridden. It’s crisp. It’s snappy. The ride quality is like steel, but the power transfer is like carbon.”

The stainless bikes are what Canon, co-founder J.C. Samuels and the rest of the crew at Ritte have wanted to do from the beginning: Design and build their own high-end bicycles.

Above: Russ Denny, on the left, with Ritte's Dave Lieberman at Denny's shop in Hemet, California.

Above: A one-off Ritte 29er mountain bike, commissioned by a customer. Lieberman, an avid mountainbiker, is pushing for Ritte to add the bike to its lineup. "I think it will be a really nice addition," he said.

And it’s just another example of how Ritte has done everything backward. Most bike companies started out building hand-made high-end rigs, then went mass-market with bikes churned out of a factory in China.

“We still do everything ass-backward every day,” Cohen said with a laugh. “But our business plan still works.”

How well it works remains to be seen. The guys at Ritte hold no illusions that they’ll pose a threat to the likes of Specialized or Cannondale, but they don’t want to. They just want to build cool bikes for a cool brand with a cool outlook on a sport they love.

“We want to show that you can take the sport seriously without taking yourself seriously,” Canon said.

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